'Sweeney Todd': A Comedy

It is hard today to separate the legend of Sweeney Todd from Stephen Sondheim’s musical version. The show is widely considered one of Sondheim’s masterpieces. The 2023 revival is the fourth Broadway production since 1979, and, as Logan Cullwell-Block relates in Playbill, it has frequently been staged in opera houses and in concert versions around the world. However, the story of Sweeney Todd had already been dramatized, sometimes musically, for over a century before the premiere of Sondheim’s version. 

The musical cites as its source an adaptation by Christopher Bond, which Sondheim had seen in London in 1973, and indeed Sondheim did adapt much of Bond’s text for his lyrics. Bond’s play begins with Anthony saying: “I have sailed the world, beheld its fairest cities, seen the pyramids, the wonders of the east. Yet it is true—there is no place like home” (words familiar to those who know Sondheim’s "No Place Like London"). The Judge’s self-flagellation scene, cut from the original Broadway production of the musical but restored in many versions since also comes from Bond, and songs like Mrs. Lovett’s "By the Sea" are drawn from monologues in the play. A copy of pages of Bond’s script in costume designer Franne Lee’s papers shows an initial sketch for the workings of the barber shop chair, a set piece she worked on with her then-husband Eugene Lee.

Clearly, the Bond version is, as both Sondheim and the copyright notice state, the primary source of the text and narrative of the musical. However, Bond himself drew from many productions and adaptations of the legend that preceded his own, and it’s likely Sondheim saw versions of these as well. The acting edition of the Bond version (now published by Concord Theatricals) includes an introduction by Bond in which he explains that he hoped to distinguish his adaptation from others by attempting to recapture what 19th-century audiences of melodrama might have felt. Bond writes:

My object has been to add to the chair and the pies an exciting story, characters that are large but real, and situations that, given a mad world not unlike our own, are believable. For these seem to me to be the ingredients that melodrama has lost in recent years; undoubtedly in its heyday during the last century melodrama involved people, entertained them, frightened, amused and moved them: nowadays the fashion is to “send them up”, and ask the audience merely to laugh at the naïveté of their forebears.

Introducing the show in his book of collected lyrics and commentary, Finishing the Hat, Sondheim remembers that even the production of the Bond play that he saw in London, "was played primarily as a comedy." Nevertheless, it gave Sondheim the idea for a musical that could "scare the hell out of" an audience.

Yet the dark humor of Sweeney Todd remains present in Sondheim’s text (e.g. Sweeney’s mechanical throat-slitting while singing the lovely ballad, "Johanna"), and seems to be an inextricable element of the story. In the 2023 revival, Annaleigh Ashford plays Mrs. Lovett very broadly to accentuate the dark humor of the piece. Even if Bond wanted to draw the characters more fully, Sondheim wanted to make the show scarier and Prince wanted to insert social commentary; the idea of a cannibalistic pie shop seems to evoke more laughter than goosebumps. 

Perhaps Sondheim also remembered, even if subconsciously, a production of Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street that opened at the Sullivan Street Playhouse (which became the longtime home of The Fantasticks several years later). The Daily News reported that the new theatre would open with “a musical version” of the play. It played in the West Village venue starting on August 27, 1957 and ran through September 22, just as Sondheim’s own West Side Story was making its way to Broadway. Later, on opening day, the same paper reported the play was "set to music and song in a new version by John Graziano." The New York Times reported the script was revised by Richard Leigh from George Dibdin Pitt’s 19th-century version with lyrics by Charles Turners. Whether Sondheim had time to see the show in New York is unclear, as West Side Story was on the road in its pre-Broadway tour, but he may at least have read about it and considered the idea as a possible future project.

The New York Times reported that, like the versions Bond knew, the production largely depended on comedy. In his review for the paper, Arthur Gelb wrote, "It’s hard to make out why an outrageously creaky little melodrama like ‘Sweeney Todd,’ with neither wit nor poetry to redeem its blatantly dated plot, should be moderately entertaining. There’s no denying that the play, in the hands of a cheerful and skilled young company, moves fast." The New York Herald Tribune review described the production thusly:

It is played in the new Sullivan Street Playhouse just south of Bleecker St. which has about 120 seats set in amphitheater style around a central clearing. There is no stage in the ordinary sense, only a backdrop which is reeled across behind the actors, an ingenious manner of copying with this play’s fifteen scenes. The actors do not restrict themselves to the arena but go lunging up the aisles so that it is well to keep one’s feet and elbows out of the way.

Little survives of this production in the archives at NYPL. There may be a script and score in the copyright deposits in the Library of Congress, but to the best of my knowledge, there is otherwise no script, score, or any design documents. There are, however, about 30 photographs of the production, taken by Friedman-Abeles, preserved in their files here. A few selections are below. Even in the still images, it’s possible to discern the dark slapstick comedy described in the reviews. Over the 40 years that Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd has played on stages around the world, there are frequent debates as to whether it is (or should be) a musical or an opera. In fact, it may be that Sweeney Todd is always, regardless of the adaptation, at heart, a comedy.

Images used in this post from the Friedman-Abeles Collection have been preserved, cataloged, and digitized through the generosity of Nancy Abeles Marks and the Joseph S. and Diane H. Steinberg Charitable Trust.